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More "Spiny" Quotes from Famous Books



... was prepared with what he called a spoke for Jimmy's wheel. Incidentally it would be a nasty one for Lucy, and none the worse for that. He considered that she was getting out of hand, and that Urquhart might be a nuisance because such a spiny customer to tackle. But he had a little plan, and chuckled over it a good deal when ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... pulled the snorkel from his mouth, and gritted, "Swim away. Let him use you for a target. I'm going to get that son of a spiny sea walrus." ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin

... half a mind to drown myself then; but an odd wish to see the whole adventure out, a queer, impersonal, spectacular interest in myself, restrained me. I stretched my limbs, sore and painful from the pricks of the spiny plants, and stared around me at the trees; and, so suddenly that it seemed to jump out of the green tracery about it, my eyes lit upon a black face watching me. I saw that it was the simian creature who had met ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells

... him back in kind. "Yes, and the funk you were in for fear Spiny Tatlow 'ud see us, ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... constant, if fertile, is therefore impossible to decide. Berberis ilicifolia is considered as a hybrid between the European barberry (B. vulgaris) and the cultivated shrub Mahonia aquifolia. The latter has pinnate leaves, the former undivided ones. The hybrid has undivided leaves which are more spiny than those of the European parent, and which are not deciduous like them, but persist during the winter, a peculiarity inherited from the Mahonia. As far as I [271] have been able to ascertain, this hybrid ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries

... most important species of the dozen which make up its genus. Though slow in growth, it shoots up a magnificent stem, to the height sometimes of eighty feet, the summit of which is covered with a graceful crown of pinnated leaves. The trunk is exceedingly rough and spiny; the flower spathes, which appear in the axils of the leaves, are woody, and contain branched spadices with many flowers; more than 11,000 have been counted on a single male spadix. As the flowers are dioecious, it is necessary to impregnate the female ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various

... the higher naturalists. Cuvier, with not a few of the ichthyologists who preceded him, arranged the fishes into two distinct series,—the Cartilaginous and Osseous; and these last he mainly divided into the hard or spiny-finned fishes, and the soft or joint-finned fishes. He placed the sturgeon in his Cartilaginous series; while in his soft-finned order he found a place for the Polypterus of the Nile and the Lepidosteus of the Ohio and St. Lawrence. But the arrangement, though it seemed at the time one ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... at the crowds with green and seemingly sleepy eyes; but at moments they raised their giant heads, and breathed through wheezing nostrils the exhalations of the multitude, licking their jaws the while with spiny tongues. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... singing flame. A twig of finger size will be furred to the thickness of one's wrist by pink five-petaled bloom, so close that only the blunt-faced wild bees find their way in it. In this latitude late frosts cut off the hope of fruit too often for the wild almond to multiply greatly, but the spiny, tap-rooted shrubs are ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin

... you hurt?" Amy was crying over and over, as, regardless of the stiff manzanita and the spiny deer brush, she tore her ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... these baboons thus acted in concert. Mr. Wallace (41. 'The Malay Archipelago,' vol. i. 1869, p. 87.) on three occasions saw female orangs, accompanied by their young, "breaking off branches and the great spiny fruit of the Durian tree, with every appearance of rage; causing such a shower of missiles as effectually kept us from approaching too near the tree." As I have repeatedly seen, a chimpanzee will throw any object at hand at a person who offends him; and the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... more difficult. Every hollow, every earth hummock and sagebush had to be used as cover. The hunter wriggled through the grass flat on his face, pushing himself along for perhaps a quarter of a mile by his toes and fingers, heedless of the spiny cactus. When near enough to the huge, unconscious quarry the hunter began firing, still keeping himself carefully concealed. If the smoke was blown away by the wind, and if the buffaloes caught no glimpse ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... shall say.—I lay by the hot white sand-dunes. . Small yellow flowers, sapless and squat and spiny, Stared at the sky. And silently there above us Day after day, beyond our dreams and knowledge, Presences swept, and over us streamed their shadows, Swift and blue, or dark. . . . What did they mean? What sinister threat of power? What hint of beauty? Prelude to what ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken

... rubbing against his leg, pricking it through his anklets. Kay looked down. A lady porcupine, with tiny new quills, was showing recognition, even affection, if such a spiny beast could be said ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... the glad joyous spring, returned. The leaf-buds, wrapped within their gummy and downy cases, began to unfold; the dark green pines, spruce, and balsams began to shoot out fresh spiny leaves, like tassels, from the ends of every bough, giving out the most refreshing fragrance; the crimson buds of the young hazels, and the scarlet blossoms of the soft maple, enlivened the edges of the streams; the bright ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill

... (Dracaena Draco Linn., Palma canariensis Tourn.), which an Irish traveller called a 'dragon-palm,' owed its vulgar name to the fancy that the fruit contained the perfect figure of a standing dragon with gaping mouth and long neck, spiny back and crocodile's tail. It is a quaint tree of which any ingenious carpenter could make a model. The young trunk is somewhat like that of the Oreodoxa regia, or an asparagus immensely magnified; but it frequently grows larger above than below. At first it bears only bristly, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... trammelled fast, Was yet dragged forward by the circling rein Which either hand directed; nor they quenched The frenzy of their flight before each trace, Wheel-spoke and splinter of the woful car, Each boulder-stone, sharp stub and spiny shell, Huge fish-bone wrecked and wreathed amid the sands On that detested beach, was bright with blood And morsels of his flesh; then fell the steeds Head foremost, crashing in their mooned fronts, 60 Shivering ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning

... rode all day over an uninteresting country. I am tired of repeating the epithets barren and sterile. These words, however, as commonly used, are comparative; I have always applied them to the plains of Patagonia, which can boast of spiny bushes and some tufts of grass; and this is absolute fertility, as compared with Northern Chile. Here again, there are not many spaces of two hundred yards square, where some little bush, cactus or lichen, may not be ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... great to comprehend all at once. So with Bill's mind. He saw the yellow and black fur grow toward the rock. It seemed to ooze around it and then up and over the top of it. Bill saw, when it reached the top of the rock, that it dropped a spiny tendril to the ground. Like a root, the tendril buried itself into the earth below the jutting rock, and slowly the rock was covered with ...
— The Day of the Dog • Anderson Horne

... acuminated[obs3]; pointed; tapering; conical, pyramidal; mucronate[obs3], mucronated[obs3]; spindle shaped, needle shaped; spiked, spiky, ensiform[obs3], peaked, salient; cusped, cuspidate, cuspidated[obs3]; cornute[obs3], cornuted[obs3], cornicultate[obs3]; prickly; spiny, spinous[obs3], spicular; thorny, bristling, muricated[obs3], pectinated[obs3], studded, thistly, briary[obs3]; craggy &c. (rough) 256; snaggy, digitated[obs3], two-edged, fusiform[Microb]; dentiform[obs3], denticulated; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... FIGURE 1.4. Five spiny or grooved cells, with edges joined, from the outer skin (epidermis): one of them (b) ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel

... neck with a row of ovals; the shoulder with a true herring-bone band; a vine with spiny leaves around the body. ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson

... case, and gives the idea of what we regard the typical marking of the capillitium in A. oerstedtii. Externally the species resembles somewhat A. nodulosa, and the network of the capillitium is also suggestive of that form; the spiny capillitium is unique. ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride

... of the Palinuridiae seems to be very peculiar. Claus found in the ova of the Spiny Lobster (Palinurus), embryos with a completely segmented body, but wanting the appendages of the tail, abdomen, and last two segments of the middle-body; they possess a single median and considerably compound ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller

... from the surfaces of the gills by falling downward and out from the crevices between. The same is true with the shelving fungi on trees, etc., where the spores readily fall out from the pores of the honey-combed surface or from between the teeth of those sorts with a spiny under surface. If the caps were so arranged that the fruiting surface came to be on the upper side, the larger number of the spores would lodge in the crevices between the extensions of the fruiting surface. Singularly, this position ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson

... Nelly's silence gave to her! You never knew what strange thoughts were going on behind that proud taciturnity. She showed the guests to chairs, of which a great many, mostly already filled, stood about the center table, on which sprawled the great, spiny, unlovely plant. Marise sat down, taking little Mark on her knees. Elly leaned against her. Paul sat close beside old Mr. Welles. Their eyes were on the big pink bud enthroned in the uncomeliness of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... boxes of whiting with opaline reflections; and baskets of smelts—neat little baskets, pretty as those used for strawberries, and exhaling a strong scent of violets. And meantime the tiny black eyes of the shrimps dotted as with beads of jet their soft-toned mass of pink and grey; and spiny crawfish and lobsters striped with black, all still alive, raised a grating sound as they tried to crawl along ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... jolliest little fish in the tank. He is the life of the collection, and will survive the severest trials of heat and cold. The Chub, a common tenant of our ponds, is also a good subject for domestication. The Tench and Loach are very interesting, but also very delicate. Among the spiny-finned fishes, the Sticklebacks are the prettiest, but so savage that they often occasion much mischief. For a vessel containing twelve gallons the following selection of live stock is among those recommended: Three Gold Carp, three Prussian Carp, two Perch, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... feed on corn blades, and last summer undoubtedly lived in that very field. When I studied Io history in my moth books, I learned these caterpillars ate willow, wild cherry, hickory, plum, oak, sassafras, ash, and poplar. The caterpillar was green, more like the spiny butterfly caterpillars than any moth one I know. It had brown and white bands, brown patches, and was covered with tufts of stiff upstanding spines that pierced like sharp needles. This was not because the caterpillar tried to hurt you, but ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter

... Natalie's cries; and his eyeballs were seared with the picture of her shrinking in the brutal hands of Grylls. As he crashed through the wood, the little branches whipped his face unmercifully; and the spiny shoots of the jackpines tore his clothes. He ran full tilt into unyielding obstacles; and was flung aside, unconscious of ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... with fluted sides, or symmetrical vertical rows of small thorned lumps converging at the top of the "nigger-head," as they are sometimes called, grows in great numbers in crevices on the walls. The delicate "pin cushion" gathered in clusters of myriad small spiny balls. The prickly pear, here in Ha Va Su Canyon, were not the starved, shrivelled, mineral-tinted cactus such as we found at the beginning of our trip. Instead they were green and flourishing, with large fleshy ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb

... occasional stagnant pools showed what the state of things would be a couple of months hence. The properties were divided by hedges of agave—huge growths, grandly curving their sword-pointed leaves. Its companion, the spiny cactus, writhed here and there among juniper bushes and tamarisks. Along the wayside rose tall, dead thistles, white with age, their great cluster of seed-vessels showing how fine the flower had been. Above our heads, peewits were wheeling ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... flies that infest them in the soft, tender parts of their bodies. A glance at the bird's great gaping mouth should be sufficient to convince anybody that it was meant for nothing else but catching flies, and the spiny fringe of hair at the side for caging them there when caught. In some places it is called the 'night-hawk,' and I should scarcely think there is any bird that has more names ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn

... body covered with a great head-shield, carrying two pairs of eyes, the one simple and the other compound. The feelers are converted into pincers, whilst the last pair of limbs have their bases covered with spiny teeth so as to act as jaws, and are flattened and widened out towards their extremities so as to officiate as swimming-paddles. The hinder extremity of the body is composed of thirteen rings, which have no legs attached ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson

... known that the Duckbill or Platypus (Ornithorhyncus) and the Spiny Anteater (Echidna) of Australia and Tasmania—with one representative of the latter in New Guinea, which seems to have been still connected—are semi-reptilian survivors of the first animals to suckle their young. Like the reptiles they lay tough-coated eggs and have ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... I started for Castel del Monte. It was spring, and I was going to see my love. The land about on either side, as I went, was faintly flushed with peach-blossom shining among the hoary stones. By the cliff edge the spiny cactus threw out strange withered arms. A whitethorn without spike or spine gracefully wept ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett

... time that evening we spent in picking the thorns of devil's-club out of our hands. This strange plant I had not seen before, and do not care to see it again. In plunging through the mudholes we spasmodically clutched these spiny things. Ladrone nipped steadily at the bunch of leaves which grew at the top of the twisted stalk. Again we plunged down into the cold green forest, following a stream whose current ran to the northeast. This brought us once ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... straight, sharp, wedge-shaped bill, just calculated for cutting out chips; the very long horn-tipped tongue for thrusting into the holes he makes; the peculiar arrangement of toes, two forward and two back; and the stiff, spiny tail-feathers for supporting himself against the side of a tree as he works. But getting his living so means hard work, and he has discovered for himself a much easier way. One now frequently surprises him on ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long

... creature we killed, which was an old one, were nearly ten inches in length. Our Dutch friend stated that they were so formed to guard its eyes from the thorns and spines which it meets with whilst searching for fallen fruits among the thickets of ratan and other spiny plants. Mr Hooker, however, said he thought they had once been of use to the animal in digging, but its mode of life having been somewhat changed, they had grown up into their present curious form. Instead of digging for food with its snout as other pigs do, ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... Are you hurt?" Amy was crying over and over, as, regardless of the stiff manzanita and the spiny deer brush, she tore ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... it all right enough. I give you my word that spiny one got it; but, save for that one first little cry, he took his punishment in grim and terrible silence, fighting with a blind fury that was awful to behold. What happened to him underneath there in those ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... feet high. The divisions of the leaflets are rather narrower, and somewhat more hoary, than those of the Common Cardoon. The ribs are longer, and the whole plant stronger and generally more spiny; though, on the whole, comparatively smooth. It is not, however, always very readily distinguished from the Common or Large Smooth Cardoon. It runs up to seed quicker than the ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr

... and the two scouts ran at full apeed along the narrow ribbon of grass between the prickly, spiny bushes. ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore

... among the jumping spiders appears almost infinite. The genus, or rather family of Epeira, is here characterized by many singular forms; some species have pointed coriaceous shells, others enlarged and spiny tibiae. Every path in the forest is barricaded with the strong yellow web of a species belonging to the same division with the Epeira clavipes of Fabricius, which was formerly said by Sloane to make, in the West Indies, ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... Rostafinski's figure is excellent in the present case, and gives the idea of what we regard the typical marking of the capillitium in A. oerstedtii. Externally the species resembles somewhat A. nodulosa, and the network of the capillitium is also suggestive of that form; the spiny capillitium is unique. ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride

... five-petaled bloom, so close that only the blunt-faced wild bees find their way in it. In this latitude late frosts cut off the hope of fruit too often for the wild almond to multiply greatly, but the spiny, tap-rooted shrubs are ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin

... heavily timbered, but there is wood sufficient for everyday purposes. Its chief growth is the spiny bombax, whose timber is hardly durable enough for permanent shafting. Here, however, and in all the mines upon and near the seaboard, carpenter-work should be imported from England; it will be at once cheaper and better. The country is ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

... berry-like fruit; the palmetto, with its tender succulent bud on the summit of the stem, used as a vegetable, and proving an excellent substitute for cabbage; the thorny icari, or cari—a variety of fan-palm. Its spiny stems and leaves, which cut like razors, make it difficult to approach. Its bunches of bright chestnut-brown fruit hang from between the leaves which form its crown, each bunch about a foot in length, massive and compact, like a large ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... Linn., Palma canariensis Tourn.), which an Irish traveller called a 'dragon-palm,' owed its vulgar name to the fancy that the fruit contained the perfect figure of a standing dragon with gaping mouth and long neck, spiny back and crocodile's tail. It is a quaint tree of which any ingenious carpenter could make a model. The young trunk is somewhat like that of the Oreodoxa regia, or an asparagus immensely magnified; but it frequently grows larger above than below. At ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... forward, and reach himself tall on spiny toes, To travel, to burrow into a little loose earth, afraid of the night, To crop a little substance, To move, and to be quite sure that ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence

... appeared, the spiny head cap was cautiously extended a few inches forward from the main shell. Further it was extended as the head of a turtle might slowly appear from the protection of its bony ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... by the higher naturalists. Cuvier, with not a few of the ichthyologists who preceded him, arranged the fishes into two distinct series,—the Cartilaginous and Osseous; and these last he mainly divided into the hard or spiny-finned fishes, and the soft or joint-finned fishes. He placed the sturgeon in his Cartilaginous series; while in his soft-finned order he found a place for the Polypterus of the Nile and the Lepidosteus of the Ohio and St. Lawrence. But the arrangement, though it seemed at the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... spring, the glad joyous spring, returned. The leaf-buds, wrapped within their gummy and downy cases, began to unfold; the dark green pines, spruce, and balsams began to shoot out fresh spiny leaves, like tassels, from the ends of every bough, giving out the most refreshing fragrance; the crimson buds of the young hazels, and the scarlet blossoms of the soft maple, enlivened the edges of the streams; the bright coral bark of the dogwood seemed as if freshly ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill

... mucronate[obs3], mucronated[obs3]; spindle shaped, needle shaped; spiked, spiky, ensiform[obs3], peaked, salient; cusped, cuspidate, cuspidated[obs3]; cornute[obs3], cornuted[obs3], cornicultate[obs3]; prickly; spiny, spinous[obs3], spicular; thorny, bristling, muricated[obs3], pectinated[obs3], studded, thistly, briary[obs3]; craggy &c. (rough) 256; snaggy, digitated[obs3], two-edged, fusiform[Microb]; dentiform[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... came to the meeting—bream, and perch, and roach, and dace, and gudgeon; yes, and the little ersh with his spiny back. ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome

... neighboring houses with a magnificent mantle; the brick-work piers were hidden in clusters of honeysuckle; and, to crown all, in a couple of terra-cotta vases at the summit, a pair of acclimatized cactuses displayed to the astonished eyes of the ignorant those thick leaves bristling with spiny defences which seem to be due to ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac

... creature could rest its head on a branch. But the way in which they usually diverge just over and in front of the eye has suggested the more probable idea, that they serve to guard these organs from thorns and spines while hunting for fallen fruits among the tangled thickets of rattans and other spiny plants. Even this, however, is not satisfactory, for the female, who must seek her food in the same way, does not possess them. I should be inclined to believe rather that these tusks were once useful, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... this palm; the cultivated, the wild, one distinguished by long spines on the branches, and a fourth destitute of these spines, and called by the natives female sago. This and the cultivated species afford the best farina; the spiny variety, which has a slender trunk, and the wild tree, yield but an inferior quality of sago. The farinaceous matter afforded by each plant is very considerable, 500 lbs. being a frequent quantity, while 300 lbs. may be taken as the common average produce ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... I had half a mind to drown myself then; but an odd wish to see the whole adventure out, a queer, impersonal, spectacular interest in myself, restrained me. I stretched my limbs, sore and painful from the pricks of the spiny plants, and stared around me at the trees; and, so suddenly that it seemed to jump out of the green tracery about it, my eyes lit upon a black face watching me. I saw that it was the simian creature who had met the launch upon the beach. He was clinging to the oblique stem of a palm-tree. I ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells

... know the praying rogue. Mighty devout and mighty cruel; crushes everything he can master, or impales it on his spiny shanks and feeds upon it, like a gluttonous wretch as he is. I have seen the Mantis religiosa on a larger scale than this, now and then. A sacred insect, sir,—sacred to many tribes of men; to the Hottentots, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... Coastline: 389 km Maritime claims: exclusive fishing zone: 200 nm territorial sea: 12 nm International disputes: none Climate: tropical; marine; moderated by trade winds; sunny and relatively dry Terrain: low, flat limestone; extensive marshes and mangrove swamps Natural resources: spiny lobster, conch Land use: arable land: 2% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 0% forest and woodland: 0% other: 98% Irrigated land: NA km2 Environment: 30 islands (eight inhabited); subject to ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... looked at the crowds with green and seemingly sleepy eyes; but at moments they raised their giant heads, and breathed through wheezing nostrils the exhalations of the multitude, licking their jaws the while with spiny tongues. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... to their parents, only they have no wings. But they hold up their spiny front legs and catch insects, and they grow and moult in the ...
— The Insect Folk • Margaret Warner Morley

... copse here now the teazles lift their spiny heads high in the hedge, the young nuts are browning, the wild mints flowering on the shores of the ditch, and the reapers are cutting ceaselessly at the ripe corn. The larks have brought their loves to a happy conclusion. Besides them ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies

... forty-eight hours from the first sowing, the mycelium will send branches into the air, which again become abundantly branched; other short submerged branches will also remain simple, or have tuft-like ramifications, each terminating in a point, so as to bristle with spiny hairs. In two or three days abruptly swollen branches, of a club shape, will make their appearance on the threads both in the air and in the fluid. Sometimes these branches are prolonged into an equal number of sporangia-bearing threads, but most frequently they divide first at their ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... out. He knew he would have to go, and was prepared with what he called a spoke for Jimmy's wheel. Incidentally it would be a nasty one for Lucy, and none the worse for that. He considered that she was getting out of hand, and that Urquhart might be a nuisance because such a spiny customer to tackle. But he had a little plan, and chuckled over it a good deal when he ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... enemy that might try to thread the mazy hallway is the rattler, who by an ingenious device is deterred from even making the attempt. To keep his snakeship from intruding on domestic privacy Mr. Rat takes several strips of spiny cactus and lays them flatways across the ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... wildernesses so desolate as to offer no food at all for one who knows what to look for. There is usually some sort of berry available. One kind of acorn is not bad to eat. Shoots of bracken are not unlike asparagus. There are some spiny wild plants whose leaves, if plucked young enough, will yield some nourishment and of course there are mushrooms. Even on stone one can find liverish rock-tripe which is edible if one dries it to complete dessication before ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... surprise at this curious termination of his involuntary rise in the world; or a silvery haddock, staring at you with round, reproachful eyes; or a pollock, handsome but worthless; or a shiny, writhing dog-fish, whose villainy is written in every line of his degenerate, chinless face. It may be that spiny gargoyle of the sea, a sculpin; or a soft and stupid bake from the mud-flats. It may be any one of the grotesque products of Neptune's vegetable garden, a sea-cucumber, a sea-carrot, or a sea-cabbage. Or it may be nothing ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke

... "I'm going to cut off his tail, and I shall say when. Then you pull the string and it will come down. Wo-ho!" he cried, as he tugged out his knife, for the tree bent and bent like a fishing-rod, the spiny centre on which he was being now very thin. Then, steadying himself, he climbed the last six feet and hung over backwards, holding up his legs and one hand, as he used his knife and divided the string tail. "Pull, ...
— Brave and True - Short stories for children by G. M. Fenn and Others • George Manville Fenn

... "That spiny affair will be discouraging to visitors!" Helen exclaimed. "Why don't you try hedges of gooseberries and currants and raspberries ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith

... ilicifolia is considered as a hybrid between the European barberry (B. vulgaris) and the cultivated shrub Mahonia aquifolia. The latter has pinnate leaves, the former undivided ones. The hybrid has undivided leaves which are more spiny than those of the European parent, and which are not deciduous like them, but persist during the winter, a peculiarity inherited from the Mahonia. As far as I [271] have been able to ascertain, this hybrid ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries

... the power to kill their prey, and stun their enemies, at a distance! Instead of a spiny defence, they are armed with electricity! The best-known sea-fish of this sort is the Electric Ray, also called the Cramp Fish or Torpedo (see p. 48). It is a clumsy fish about a yard long, and very ugly. Being too slow to catch its swift prey ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith

... moonless night, and the air was chill, but they were certainly nowhere near the polar regions, for there was no trace of snow to be seen anywhere. All about them was sand, with here and there a spiny shrub standing up ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various

... bed twice last night into the bush. The rain has washed the ground away from under its off legs, so that it tilts; and there were quantities of large longicorn beetles about during the night—the sort with spiny backs; they kept on getting themselves hitched on to my blankets and when I wanted civilly to remove them they made a horrid fizzing noise and showed fight— cocking their horns in a defiant way. I awake finally about 5 A.M. soaked through to the skin. The waterproof ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... is heavy and seldom fit for other than common purposes. Amongst the plants collected by Mr. Brown and his associates was a small one of a novel kind which we commonly called the pitcher plant. Around the root leaves are several little vases lined with spiny hairs, and there were generally found to contain a sweetish water, and also a number of dead ants. It cannot be asserted that the ants were attracted by the water, and prevented by the spiny hairs from making their escape; but it seemed not improbable that this was ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders

... couple of handsome shells, the Spiny Chiton and the Magnificent Chiton. The word Chiton, which in Greek means "shield," indicates the general shape of this shell, which resembles a shield. "These animals are a good deal like common Limpets. Those found in our northern ...
— Charley's Museum - A Story for Young People • Unknown

... the ground in places with a perfect network of gnarled, twisted, and interlocking trunks. For some reason it always seems to die when it has attained a certain age, and wherever you find its green spiny foliage you will also find dry white trunks as inflammable as tinder. It furnishes almost the only firewood of the Wandering Koraks and Chukchis, and without it many parts of north-eastern Siberia would be absolutely uninhabitable by man. Scores of nights during our explorations in Siberia, we ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... years ago, serving in large measure as the food of birds, fish and lizards. The great island continent of Australia, 1,500 miles away, is peculiar enough in its living products, quite unlike the rest of the world in its egg-laying duck-mole and spiny ant-eater, and in its abundant and varied population of pounched mammals or marsupials, emphasized by the absence (except for two or three peculiar little mice and the late-arrived black-fellow and bush-dog) of the regular ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... at Babylon, and brought it into Palestine. The citron is cultivated in China and Cochin-China. It is easily naturalized and the seeds are rapidly spread. In its wild state it grows erect; the branches are spiny, the flowers purple on the outside and white on the inside. The fruit furnishes the essential oil of citron and the essential oil of cedra. There are several varieties; the fingered citron is a curious fruit, and the Madras citron is very long ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders

... applies to the white-breasted nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis), but it is fair to assume that all the other members of this subfamily behave in the same way. The woodpeckers and creepers use their spiny tails as supports while stationary or in motion; not so the nuthatches, which are sufficiently nimble on their feet to stand or glide without converting their tails into braces. Odd as it may seem to the uninformed, the nuthatches ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser

... disgrace I say it—I dread most. You'd be up to my reason if you had ever served in a regiment. I mean, discipline—if ever you'd known discipline—in the police if you like—anything—anywhere where there's what we used to call spiny de cor. I mean, at school. And I'm," said Van Diemen, "a rank idiot double D. dolt, and flat as a pancake, and transparent as a pane of glass. You see through me. Anybody could. I can't talk of my botheration without betraying myself. What ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... surfaces of the gills by falling downward and out from the crevices between. The same is true with the shelving fungi on trees, etc., where the spores readily fall out from the pores of the honey-combed surface or from between the teeth of those sorts with a spiny under surface. If the caps were so arranged that the fruiting surface came to be on the upper side, the larger number of the spores would lodge in the crevices between the extensions of the fruiting surface. Singularly, this position of the fruiting surface does ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson

... this being the case, the highly remarkable position of the mouth in the larva, either between the bases of the two posterior pair of legs, or at least posteriorly to the first pair, together with the probable functions of the spiny points springing from the basal segments of the two hinder pair of true thoracic limbs, forcibly bring to mind the anomalous structure of the mouth being situated in the middle of the under side ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... And in the silence I hear a woman's voice make answer then: "Well, they are green, although no ship can sail them.... Sky-larks rest in the grass, and start up singing Before the girl who stoops to pick sea-poppies. Spiny, the poppies are, and oh how yellow! And the brown clay is runneled by the rain...." A moment since, the sheep that crop the grass Had long blue shadows, and the grass-tips sparkled: Now all grows old.... O voices strangely speaking, ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... seldom fit for other than common purposes. Amongst the plants collected by Mr. Brown and his associates was a small one of a novel kind which we commonly called the pitcher plant. Around the root leaves are several little vases lined with spiny hairs, and there were generally found to contain a sweetish water, and also a number of dead ants. It cannot be asserted that the ants were attracted by the water, and prevented by the spiny hairs from making their escape; but it seemed not improbable that this ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders

... said applies to the white-breasted nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis), but it is fair to assume that all the other members of this subfamily behave in the same way. The woodpeckers and creepers use their spiny tails as supports while stationary or in motion; not so the nuthatches, which are sufficiently nimble on their feet to stand or glide without converting their tails into braces. Odd as it may seem to the uninformed, the nuthatches belong to the order of passeres ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser

... tamed by skilled trainers, looked at the crowds with green and seemingly sleepy eyes; but at moments they raised their giant heads, and breathed through wheezing nostrils the exhalations of the multitude, licking their jaws the while with spiny tongues. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... its stock of matter Cleaves more together, since, indeed, 'tis made Of atoms not so smooth, so fine, and round. For the light breeze that hovers yet can blow High heaps of poppy-seed away for thee Downward from off the top; but, contrariwise, A pile of stones or spiny ears of wheat It can't at all. Thus, in so far as bodies Are small and smooth, is their mobility; But, contrariwise, the heavier and more rough, The more immovable they prove. Now, then, Since nature of mind is movable so much, Consist it must of ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... about the size of a man's head, with fluted sides, or symmetrical vertical rows of small thorned lumps converging at the top of the "nigger-head," as they are sometimes called, grows in great numbers in crevices on the walls. The delicate "pin cushion" gathered in clusters of myriad small spiny balls. The prickly pear, here in Ha Va Su Canyon, were not the starved, shrivelled, mineral-tinted cactus such as we found at the beginning of our trip. Instead they were green and flourishing, with ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb

... slope, and therefore semi-arid, covered with cercocarpus and yucca and some shrub that Madeline believed was manzanita. Every foot of the trail seemed to slide under Majesty. What hard ground there was could not be traveled upon, owing to the spiny covering or masses of shattered rocks. Gullies ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey

... suddenly to that sliding relief map away down below. He hoped that Cliff was afraid of being lost, and of landing on some high mountain that stuck up like a little hill above the general assembly of dimpled valleys and spiny ridges and hills. But if Cliff were afraid he did not say so, and when the double-pointed hill that Johnny had reason to remember slid toward them, Cliff pointed ahead to another, turned ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower

... Palinuridiae seems to be very peculiar. Claus found in the ova of the Spiny Lobster (Palinurus), embryos with a completely segmented body, but wanting the appendages of the tail, abdomen, and last two segments of the middle-body; they possess a single median and considerably compound eye; the anterior antennae are simple, ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller

... appall Beatrice greatly to-day. The miles sped swiftly under her feet. Always there were creatures to notice or laugh at,—a squirrel performing on a branch, a squawking Canada Jay surprised and utterly baffled by their tall forms, a porcupine hunched into a spiny ball and pretending a ferociousness that deceived not even such hairbrained folk as the chipmunks in the tree roots, or those queens of stupidity, the fool hens on the branch. In the way of more serious things sometimes they paused to gaze down on some ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall

... it touches the hybrid rose. During this period, also, many of the forest trees emulate the wild flowers at their feet until their inflorescence culminates in the white cord-like fringe that foretells the spiny ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... half-past six the sun settled down upon the levels with the aspect of a great forge in the heavens; and presently a monstrous pumpkin-like moon arose on the other hand. The pollard willows, tortured out of their natural shape by incessant choppings, became spiny-haired monsters as they stood up against it. She went in and upstairs ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... palms (about thirty species[168]), leguminous or pod-bearing trees, colossal nut-trees, broad-leaved Musaceae or bananas, and giant grasses. The most prominent palms are the architectural Pupunha, or "peach-palm," with spiny stems, drooping, deep green leaves, and bunches of mealy, nutritious fruit; the slender Assai, with a graceful head of delicate green plumes; the Ubussu, with mammoth, undivided fronds; the stiff, serrated-leaved Bussu, and gigantic Miriti. One of the ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... the air Like some mad Earth-god's spiny hair; The loud south-wester's swell and yell Smote it at midnight, and it fell. Thus ends the tree Where Some One ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy

... staring at you with round, reproachful eyes; or a pollock, handsome but worthless; or a shiny, writhing dog-fish, whose villainy is written in every line of his degenerate, chinless face. It may be that spiny gargoyle of the sea, a sculpin; or a soft and stupid bake from the mud-flats. It may be any one of the grotesque products of Neptune's vegetable garden, a sea-cucumber, a sea-carrot, or a sea-cabbage. Or it may be nothing at all. When you have made your grab, and deposited ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke

... with the spirally arranged leaves, and bearing a single terminal fruit ac large as a swan's egg. Others of intermediate size have irregular clusters of rough red fruits, and all have more or less spiny-edged leaves and ringed stems. The young plants of the larger species have smooth glossy thick leaves, sometimes ten feet long and eight inches wide, which are used all over the Moluccas and New Guinea, to make "cocoyas" or sleeping ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... mountains, as he was not able by any means to march over them, continuing from the east sea into which Orenoque falleth, even to Quito in Peru. Neither had he means to carry victual or munition over those craggy, high, and fast hills, being all woody, and those so thick and spiny, and so full or prickles, thorns, and briars, as it is impossible to creep through them. He had also neither friendship among the people, nor any interpreter to persuade or treat with them; and more, to his disadvantage, the caciques ...
— The Discovery of Guiana • Sir Walter Raleigh

... autumn on Epsilon. Everywhere the trees are a riot of scarlet and ocher, the scrubby bushes are shedding their leaves. Once we came upon a field of thistlelike plants with spiny seed-pods that opened as we watched, the purple spores drifting afield in an eddy of tinted mist. Max said it reminded him of Scotland. ...
— Competition • James Causey

... entrance she stopped short and sniffed the air enquiringly. Her nose told her that the spiny rats had been there, probably that very night, but they were beneath her serious attention and now that she had arrived they would lose no time in seeking other quarters; so she dismissed them from her mind without another thought. A stronger ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller









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